Linguistic form and meaning in a computational analysis of learner language -- On the integration of morpho-syntactic and semantic analysis

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Detmar Meurers
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 238697821

This research project explores and develops a new computationalarchitecture for analyzing learner language, specifically the languagewritten by second language learners of German. The goal is tointegrate the analysis of form and meaning in a way that makes itpossible to inform the morpho-syntactic analysis on the basis ofinformation about the meaning that the learner needs to express inorder to complete a given language learning task. The modulararchitecture combines backchannels for conflict information withefficient search strategies to make it possible to influence themorpho-syntactic analysis through information obtained at all levelsof processing. The integration of abductive and deductive reasoningcomponents in the tradition of computational semantics plays aprominent role in the system.The success of the new integrated analysis architecture can thoroughlybe evaluated on the basis of the teacher-annotated learner answersfrom the Corpus of Reading Comprehension Exercises in German (CREG).The new integrated approach to the analysis of the form and meaning oflearner language is of relevance in a wide range of contexts, such asthe generation of feedback for intelligent language tutoring systems,the automatic assessment of language proficiency in language testing,or the annotation of learner corpora informing linguistic researchinto language development. In terms of broader impact, the projectthus addresses the general question how the linguistic orextra-linguistic context of natural language utterances can be usedfor their analysis and interpretation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants